What I’m Watching: November Edition

A Teacher (FX)-A thought-provoking look at female teachers who sleep with high school students as exemplified through one example. Kate Mara plays young teacher Claire Wilson who’s stuck in a bad marriage and forms a friendly relationship with an economically disadvantaged student named Eric (Nick Robinson). The characters are based on composites rather than a real person which gives the show freedom to expand in any which direction.

Watching the show and absorbing it’s aftertaste on the internet reveals a dissonance. The TV show is about a complicated forbidden love affair. Wilson makes bad decisions but so does Eric (who instigated the relationship twice) and it’s a progression of mutually consummated destruction that the pair goes through.

The internet chatter, however, wants to make clear that Claire is the instigator and this is a horrendous crime. I’m not personally well-versed on the psychological case studies on this phenomenon, but the TV show does what it should do by showing us complicated characters in a horrendous crime. It’s gripping drama. If you wish to know what’s behind this issue (as you’re supposed to do with every other work of fiction), research the cases behind it.

Animaniacs (Hulu)-I grew up on this show and it personifies the 1990s for me. As a result, it’s a bit jarring to see this show updated to have Dot reference having a crush on Chris Pine and having the theme song discuss being pronoun neutral, but I’m no purist. Rebooting a good thing doesn’t ruin the original and…